


The Bad

by opalheart12



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-05 14:23:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10310222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalheart12/pseuds/opalheart12
Summary: Post season 3.Abbie has returned and she must deal with the fracture in her relationship with Crane just as he must grapple with the guilt he has for what he thought to be her death.





	1. Chapter 1

She was back.

He didn’t know how, but she was back.

“Are you gonna just stand there and look stupid or are you gonna let me in?” Her voice was incredibly cold, her words, though simple, cutting at him unexpectedly.

He felt as if cold water had been poured over his head. Without a word, he stepped aside so that she could enter and closed the door behind her.

“How?” His words sputtered out from him as if pulled and he found that he could not help but be pulled, almost magnetically, into her orbit.

She ignored him, going to her room and closing the door behind her.

* * *

He kept watch, sitting up in his own bed, knowing there was a real possibility that it was a trick. Perhaps some demon was playing him, but it did not appear that way.

His Lieutenant still ate her usual donut holes (one covered in chocolate as she always requested) and drank a caramel latte. Crane felt rather relieved that that had not changed.

“Ask me anything.” She said the next morning when she saw him emerge from his room, his face rather haggard and tired in appearance.

“I beg your pardon?”

He felt as if the world had gone faster and he slower, struggling simply to catch up. His mind felt as if it were wrapped in cotton. Nothing was clear to him anymore.

“You haven’t been sleeping because you don’t think I’m me.” Her voice had taken on that same cold tone again and he felt his stomach twist. “Well, I’m _not_ me. I’m not the _me_ that you remember. Most of that is to do with the fact that I jumped into a box that led to some plane where I existed but didn’t in some ridiculously misguided attempt to save the world from an immature goddess with boyfriend issues.”

Crane might have laughed had not the Lieutenant’s words left him feeling so horribly sick. “I...there are not adequate words with which I could apologize to you, Abbie.” When she raised an eyebrow at him, he felt as if she might be gazing into his soul.

“ _You_? No words?” She laughed, and Crane almost smiled because it was the closest Abbie seemed to be to the woman he remembered. “Please. Try your best.”

Anything he could have said died on his tongue as he realized that Abbie was most likely angry with him. She had every right to be. She’d given more to this fight between good and evil than he had, sacrificed more, risked her life more than he had. When his snake of a wife had returned, his and Abbie’s relationship had gone from 50/50 to a despicable 80/20.

“You deserved better,” he began. His voice was thick with the weight of having yet to achieve sleep. “You deserved far more than I gave or did not give. An apology, though deserved, will do nothing to change the fact that I broke this... _this_ between us. The fault lies with me.”

A smile tugged on the corner of her mouth as she stabbed her fork into a donut hole before dipping it into the latte. “Indeed, it does. But I’m not without blame either. I need to apologize to _myself_  for not standing my ground when it came to that fucking sideshow of a family you had! I just...pulled back knowing Katrina had a snowball’s chance in hell of meaning anything similar to what I am to you.”

Her voice had risen. He widened his eyes somewhat as Abbie stood and disposed of the rest of her breakfast. She turned to look out of the kitchen window at the beautiful day that seemed to be forming outside.

“I believed in you, Crane. I believed you would do anything for me the same way I would do anything for you. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Because at the end of the day it was _me_ who sacrificed my life for _you_. _Again_. All I wanted was for you to stop me, _beg_ me not to go. But you didn’t. You didn’t beg, Crane. Now, I’m back and I have to learn to live with that somehow.”

He heard her voice crack, felt her tears as if they were his own. There was nothing he could possibly say. So, he got up and walked over to her. She turned to face him, suddenly quite aware of her proximity to his.

“Nothing I say could ever hope to make up for all the pain I caused you. But I ask now if you will allow me to show you what I was too cowardly to before you were gone.”

He’d stepped closer to her, lifting his own hand to meet hers, connecting them finger to finger before engulfing hers. Their bodies were being pulled together by some unseen force.

For the first time since her return, Abbie felt afraid. Not afraid for her safety but afraid of getting hurt again. She felt her eyes drifting down to the floor as she suddenly recalled the feeling of disappointment and emptiness that filled her the second she knew that she would sacrifice her entire being for Crane even if he would not do the same.

She could feel the doubt clouding her now as clear as she could feel his strong fingers to guide her face upward to his own.

“I am here now,” he breathed out. “Come to me.”

The air felt cold and charged, the two of them trembling under the weight of guilt, disappointment, and self-loathing. Against her will, tears sprung to her eyes, running down her face silently.

Suddenly, she felt warmth on her cheeks and realized that Crane was kissing the tears away from her face. She closed her eyes, allowing more tears to fall as he kissed her forehead and pulled her against him.

“Never again, Abbie. I swear it.” 

* * *

She woke up in the middle of the night, dreams of the other place startling her.

There had been no up or down, no light or dark, no sound. She simply _was_. After what had felt like hundreds of years, she’d somehow been flung back into the land of the living.

The cold that had crept into her chest in the other place did not appear to be abating. She wondered if it was because she found it harder and harder to care about reality when none of it mattered, not even their fight against Moloch.

What was the point of it all? What were they fighting for?

She thought a lot about this as she padded quietly outside on the porch with a blanket wrapped around her. There was a slight chill in the air, but nothing Abbie wasn’t already used to. The moon was positively massive, a huge, bright crescent in the sky. The sounds of nighttime nature filled her ears and she closed her eyes, allowing herself to just feel.

“Is everything alright, Lieutenant?” A groggy Ichabod Crane stood in the doorway, peering out at her with concern etched across his face.

She nodded wordlessly as she pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped the blanket around herself. A moment later, she felt Crane sit down next to her, his hand reaching for hers, anchoring her as if she were a helium balloon itching to reach the sky.

They stayed that way for an hour before Abbie decided she needed to go back inside. He followed her quietly to her room, seeing that she was tucked in and wanted for nothing before heading back to his room.

However, as he turned to leave, he felt her hand grasp his wrist, pulling him back toward the bed. Crane looked down at her with confusion on his face. Abbie moved over to allow him room and pulled the blankets back.

Cautiously, he climbed in after her. She turned her back to him and moments later he geard her breathing even out as she fell into a peaceful sleep. He kept as far to the right edge of the bed as possible without falling off, not wanting to overstep his bounds.

Instead, he turned his back toward hers, wondering if their relationship would ever be the same again.


	2. Chapter 2

She was with him and she wasn’t. She was always so close to him now, yet he felt they were further apart than they ever had been. Anyone with eyes and moderate intelligence could see that there had been a shift between them since Abbie’s return.

Jenny noticed that the two of them fought better than they ever had. There appeared to be some new kind of anger and determination between the two of them. Moloch had gone quiet and with Pandora out of the picture, none of them were sure of how to proceed through the break they’d been giving. Jenny called Frank, asking if she could come visit since she and Joe needed a change of scenery after his near-death experience. He’d obliged, thankfully, and that was how they ended up in Arizona.

Since they’d left, Crane felt more alone than he ever had. His and Abbie’s relationship was an odd, distorted caricature of what it once was. With Joseph Corbin and Jenny in Arizona, there was no one he could talk to. He and Abbie moved the way planets did, close enough to see and feel each other, but never quite colliding. He had not yet been able to decide if that was good or bad.

It was his own punishment, he supposed, for not stopping Abbie from jumping into that wretched box. He was more than deserving of it.

Then, one night, something changed.

It had been exactly 1:37am on a particularly chilly and rainy night when Ichabod was startled awake from the worst nightmare he’d ever had.

* * *

_He’d been holding an ancient knife of some sort and they were in the woods. He and Abbie were separated in the heat of battle with some unseen and unknown force. He raced through the woods, his legs burning, his chest heaving as he attempted to maintain his breath. Then, he heard it: Abbie screaming._

_Suddenly, he was in a clearing, the clearing with the four white trees. Abbie was on the ground, crying, holding something dark and sticky and wrong in her hands. He bent down and saw that there was a gaping wound in her chest and she was bleeding more than he thought a human could. She was holding her heart in her own hands._

_“Why is this happening to me?” she sobbed, the sound, like that of a dying animal, shook him to his core._

_Before he could answer, some force he could not see or control pushed him forward so that the knife was inching closer and closer to the heart in Abbie’s hands. Her heart. Before he could stop it, the knife plunged deep into her heart and an unearthly sound escaped them both as Abbie keeled over, all life gone from her body. The blood in her heart turned black and the knife grew hot. He dropped it, shock racing through his veins._

_“No,” he choked out, pulling himself so that he was on top of Abbie, checking her over for any signs of life. “Please, no.” Crane felt tears racing from his eyes like waterfalls as he took in Abbie’s lifeless body. In a moment of purely misguided thinking, he scooped up what remained of the heart in his hands, attempting to place it back into her chest._

_It was no use._

_She was gone forever._

* * *

 

He’d shot up in the bed, sweat covering every inch of his body, hyperventilating. He threw the sheets away from him and moved away from the bed as fast he could when he noticed his Lieutenant was not there. Crane backed away from the bed, tears filling his eyes as Abbie’s body appeared in his head. “No, no, no, no, no. Not her. Please, not her.” He fell to the ground and against the wall, pulling his knees to his chest, a blood curdling sob wrenching itself from his body.

The door flew open rather suddenly and there she stood in the doorway, looking every bit the angel he knew she was. For that was all she could be at this point. What other being would return to him after what he had done?

“What is it? What happened?” She kneeled down in front of him, her hands coming to rest on either side of his face.

His eyes found hers and he began to sob harder. “Dead. You were...it was _me_ , I did this to you! It was me!”

He felt warmth like he’d never known when she pulled him into her arms, his face turned in to her chest. Her lips pressed softly against his forehead as she let him cry. “I’m here. I’m right here.”

Abbie had felt the difference in their relationship the way one felt a storm was near. The air between them was different. They hardly spoke. What was there to say? She got the feeling that Crane gave her space in an effort to help rebuild her trust in him, but she could not tell for herself if this was the case. She trusted him. She knew that. Despite the Pandora situation, she knew that.

Crane loved her.

It wasn’t anything she could run away from anymore. It was the truth, and while Abbie found it troubling to believe at first, she knew she could not hide from it. Not anymore. If her “death” had taught her anything, it was that running away, hiding what you felt for the ones you loved, it was positively useless. She recalled thinking over and over again that she should have just told him how she felt. Maybe then she wouldn’t have gone into that box.

“It was just a dream, Crane, alright? Whatever it was, it wasn’t real.” Abbie pulled away from him and made certain that his eyes found hers.

His eyes travelled down to her chest and he brought his hand to it, nearly crying when he did not feel the gaping cavity there. He bent down to rest his ear against the very same place, letting out a relieved breath when he heard her heart beating steady inside her chest. “Oh, thank God.”

An hour later, Abbie had gotten Crane to calm down and made him tea the way he liked it. He’d asked if he could sleep in her room the rest of the night. She would never have dreamed of telling him he couldn’t. She brought him the tea and climbed into the bed next to him, sitting up so that she was close enough if he needed her but far enough away that he still had his space.

Crane’s gaze bore down into the mug of tea and she knew that his mind was somewhere else. She watched him carefully as he drained the mug and set it on the nightstand. She noticed his hands and fingers tapping and flexing furiously. Abbie knew then that he needed something to hold on to.

She reached out and pressed her hands down on his, stilling then instantly. When he looked at her, it was as if he had never seen her before. His eyes were incredibly distant, as if he were only staring through her.

When she reached past him to turn off the lamp, the room was enveloped in darkness and Crane moved so that he was buried beneath the blankets in a fetal position. He closed his eyes tightly, trying (and failing) to block out the images from his nightmare.

He feels his heart start to beat so quickly that he believes it might make his chest break, He feels his mouth go dry. He begins to shake as breathing picks up. Suddenly, he feels warmth and pressure. When he opens his eyes, his Lieutenant has her arms and legs wrapped around him, hugging him tightly. Her face is buried in his neck and he is overcome by the scent of coconut and vanilla.

“Lieutenant, I--”

“Don’t. No more apologies,” she kissed his neck and felt his arms tighten around her. “We start fresh, baby. Only forward from here on out.”

As they clung to each other, Crane calmed and began to feel the weight of nearly everything press down upon him. He had the urge to sleep for a thousand years. “Abbie,” he breathed out, his voice little more than a whisper. “I was a coward, you know. I was terribly afraid and not nearly brave enough to tell you but...I love you. More than any man could be capable, I love you. I could not rest until you knew that.”

He felt her smile against his neck and she pulled away so that their faces were inches apart. “I love you too, Ichabod Crane. I think I always have.”

They fell asleep together, feeling closer than they had in a very long time.

 

 


End file.
